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Saturday, December 25, 2010

Big Sexy

It’s Christmas! A holiday I grudgingly celebrate for my family, but generally dislike as it celebrates two things I’m not an especially big fan of (religion, capitalism). So clearly, what better time to review porn comics?

Big Sexy is a fat (over ninety pages) anthology of porn comics from a bunch of different creators, many of whom are involved with the Centre for Cartoon Studies. When I look at something like this I’m really left with just one question, why not get another couple of submissions, get it professionally published with a spine and release it as a book? I mean, I love minicomics and zines as much as the next person (or more than, as the next person probably has no idea what they are), but I also know that they limit your potential audience. You’re not going to get rich doing comics of any type, but at least with professional publishing and a spine you can get yourself onto bookshelves in shops around the world (except Canada, who generally won’t import porn comics) and gain access to a larger readership.

Perhaps someone got a great deal on copying. Or the CCS has their own print shop and so they could run these off for cost. I don’t know, it just confuses me a little.

But none of that is talking about the actual comics, which are porn! Penises! Vaginas! Breasts! Penetration! Cum! Yum! The stories here range from sexy to sweet and even verging into a bit creepy (sometimes all at the same time). The art styles are many and varied, and like all anthologies some of the works are better than others.

Rachel Duke’s comic (see below) manages to be both funny and sexy in its treatment of oral sex. Denise Warren’s tale of her time as a phone sex operator barely counts as comics, but is still interesting, and oddly sweet. While Meagan Frappiea’s adaptation of this song is perhaps not what the original creators had in mind, but manages to be sexy, though no doubt in part due to my fetish surrounding space girls. *swoon*

That’s just scratching the surface though, as there’s more than a dozen other stories, featuring both gay and straight sex, lust, longing, desire, a whole lot of sex toys, and a few more unicorns than I expected.

2 comments:

For some reason I only now find this while Googling around, but thanks for the review!

To answer your question about the format: we were going to do it as a zine if under a certain number of pages or as a book if over a somewhat larger number of pages. Instead, amongst much enthusiasm and some miscommunication, we ended up with too many pages for a zine and too few for a book, and ran too short on time to pull it together as a book. When the dust settled, we ended up with the crazy-size zine that puzzles you so. I'm a little proud of having helped produce a zine with such a ridiculous page-count, but the next one's definitely going to be smaller (probably around 64 pages).

I only include website, email, and PO Box addresses. I'm not comfortable printing what could be people's home addresses on the internet. If you want your address included with the review of your zine let me know.